Artist – Heather Cassils

“Fast Twitch// Slow Twitch” is a video made as part of an endurance performance entitled “Cuts: a Traditional Sculpture.” In a reinterpretation of Eleanor Antin’s 1972 performance “Carving: A Traditional Sculpture” in which Antin crash dieted for 45 days and documented her body daily with photographs from four vantage points, Cassils used a mastery of body building and nutrition to gain 23 pounds of muscle over 23 weeks. As opposed to the feminine act of weight loss in Antin’s performance, Cassils performs a transformation into traditionally masculine muscular form. On one half of the screen Cassils displays a time lapse animation, collapsing the 23 weeks of photographs of Cassils’ transformation into 23 seconds. Juxtaposed against the speed of the time lapse are highly stylized scenes, which play in painful slow motion depicting a process laden with exhaustion, pain, nausea, “jouissance” and trembling. “Fast Twitch// Slow Twitch” offers a striking overview of the entire performance that draws out its conceptual clarity. This twist on “getting cut” queers the trans body by showcasing the cut of musculature as opposed to the cut of the surgeon’s knife.